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Lucy groaned, moving restlessly towards the door. 'Shall we go downstairs and have some tea while we talk? I'm dying of thirst, aren't you, Prue? All this agitation makes one thirsty, don't you think?'
Jim Allardyce followed her, but Prue was reluctant to talk any more.
'You know,' said Lucy, over her shoulder, 'what I still can't believe is how Lynsey could act that way. Sneaking into that hospital every day, secretly visiting a strange young man she knows is engaged to someone else! I didn't know my own daughter, did I? Did anyone?
I've never seen Josh so angry, he's like a thunderstorm in the house.'
Prue sat down on the bed abruptly, her knees too weak to hold her up any longer. When Lucy talked about Josh she almost saw him; that dark, angry face, those glittering eyes flashing at her—the mere idea of him made her stomach cave in and her heart crash against her ribs.
His mother had hit the nail right on the head when she said that he was like a thunderstorm in the house. That was just what Josh was ...
an elemental creature of darkness and storm!
'Are you OK?' Her father stood beside her, looking down into her pale face with anxiety.
"Yes, I'm just . . . tired,' she lied.
'Tired,' he repeated, frowning, and Lucy turned back into the room, her face guilty.
'Oh, poor Prue, you do look tired. You've had a shock, you should be resting. Lie down on your bed and I'll come up with a tray in a minute.
Something light, an omelette; a glass of milk?'
'No, nothing!' Prue said, and heard the sharpness in her own voice, sighing. 'Sorry, I didn't mean to snap, it's just that I'm not hungry and I'd like to have an hour or two on my own.'
'Of course,' they said, and tiptoed out as if she was a child. The door closed and Prue lay back on the bed, staring up at the ceiling. She had often lain in this room during those long ago childhood years, listening to the wind blowing over the moors, the cry of birds, the distant barking of a fox somewhere on the hill, or the angry voices of the adults downstairs. She shut her eyes , and it came back vividly; that feeling of helplessness and misery.
She tried to think of something happier; she deliberately conjured up memories of running through the fields on a warm summer morning watching the larks high up above; suspended in mid- heaven and singing like angels.
She must have drifted off to sleep soon afterwards, because she dreamt of being at a party, a children's party at Killane House. Prue was wandering through the maze of passages and rooms; frightened by the boom of the wind in the chimneys, wondering where everyone else had vanished. They were playing some childish game; hide and seek, maybe. She heard a sound in a cupboard and opened it; it was dark inside but somebody moved in the darkness, somebody's hand reached out and grabbed her, dragged her into the cupboard, slamming the door behind her before she could escape again.
'Got you!' somebody whispered, and Prue screamed, high and shrill, but before she could scream again somebody kissed her.
She had never been kissed like that before; his mouth was warm and moist, it tasted of cider, which some of the older boys at the party had been drinking. Prue was too startled to kiss him back or to fight him off; she just stood there, wide-eyed and breathless.
'Who . . .?' she whispered, unable to see his face in the dark little space.
'Who? Twit twoo . . .' he mocked, and then suddenly pushed her out of the cupboard again just as. a little crowd of her friends ran past.
Prue was carried along with them and the dream dissolved into another dream of being chased across the moors by someone she couldn't see, someone who terrified her.
'Wake up,' someone said, far away, and she tossed and turned.
'No, leave me alone.'
'Wake up,' the deep voice said again, nearer now, and then she was back in the dark cupboard, his mouth closing over hers, warm and hard, the contours of it familiar yet strange; and Prue jack-knifed upwards, gasping and panic-stricken.
'No!'
Her eyes flew open and she looked into Josh's face with a sense of terror; yet she had known it was Josh before she looked, she had known all the time; she had known in the dark little cupboard in her dream—but why had she dreamt that she was a child?
'You were having a nightmare,' he said. 'You wouldn't wake up when I called you.'
He was on the bed, leaning over her; too close, much too close. She stared into his eyes and saw that their darkness had golden centres; little rays of gold around the glittering black pupil. His lashes were thicker than she had realised, too, and as she stared at him he drooped the lashes over his eyes as if hiding something from her.
'Where's my father?' she asked huskily.
'He went back to work.' Josh ran a lazy hand over her tousled hair and she shivered.
